ENGLISH LITERATURE 



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ENGLISH LITERATURE 



critical prefaces manifest, for the 

 first time, the qualities of urbanity, 

 of ease and elegance combined 

 with force, which mark the prose 

 of a people who have come of age 

 socially and culturally. 



The new instrument lent itself 

 to all the purposes of an age in 

 which political and social life 

 entered into the closest union with 

 literature. The first of these is 

 satire ; and the pamphlets and 

 occasional pieces of Jonathan 

 Swift, from The Tale of a Tub to 

 the Travels by Lemuel Gulliver, 

 made him a power in English politi- 

 cal life, and revealed the greatest 

 mastery of irony in the English 

 or perhaps any other tongue. 

 Richard Steele and Joseph Addi- 

 son, pamphleteers on the other 

 side from Swift, showed in The 

 Tatler and The Spectator how the 

 same style, used with less mascu- 

 line vigour than in Dry den's, and 

 less incisive virulence than in 

 Swift's prose, but with a delightful 

 blend of irony and " sweet reason- 

 ableness," might be made to incul- 

 cate good sense and purer manners 

 on a society which still felt the 

 evil effects of Puritan and Restora- 

 tion excesses. The Tatler and The 

 Spectator had many successors 

 down to the end of the century, in- 

 cluding The Guardian and John- 

 son's Rambler and Idler. 



Birth of the Modern Novel 



The first of modern novels in 

 Western Europe was Cervantes' 

 Don Quixote, whose fame was 

 quickly diffused. The most in- 

 teresting precursors of the novel 

 in English were such varied pro- 

 ducts as the picaresque and senti- 

 mental extravagances of Aphra 

 Behn's Oroonoko and The Forced 

 Marriage ; Bunyan's realistic alle- 

 gories ; Daniel Defoe's stories, 

 which are almost the complete 

 thing, e.g. Robinson Crusoe, Cap- 

 tain Singleton, Moll Flanders, Cap- 

 tain Jack ; and the fantastic real- 

 ism of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's 

 Travels. But a potent shaping in- 

 fluence was that of the press, which, 

 beginning in the reign of James I, 

 had developed in the News Books, 

 Mercuries, etc., of the Civil Wars, 

 the last phase of which was the 

 Newsletters of Henry Muddiman 

 and the fuller journalistic work of 

 John Dunton and Daniel Defoe. 



The man in whose work these 

 various elements realistic narra- 

 tive, the minute portrayal of con- 

 temporary life and manners, the 

 didactic interest in conduct crys- 

 tallised, finding their centre in the 

 sympathetic analysis of a human 

 soul passing through a moral crisis, 

 was Samuel Richardson, whose 

 Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles 

 Grandison created a type of novel 



which has been more assiduously 

 cultivated in France than in 

 England. A different kind of plot, 

 deriving from Don Quixote, full 

 of adventures at inns, bringing 

 together all sorts and conditions of 

 men, a more mascuJine philosophy 

 of life and conduct, made Henry 

 Fielding, dramatist, essayist, and 

 novelist, the father of a novel more 

 characteristically English than that 

 of Richardson. Joseph Andrews, 

 Jonathan Wild, Tom Jones, and 

 Amelia are the most genial and 

 vivid pictures? of English life which 

 the 18th century has> bequeathed. 

 Smollett and Goldsmith 



He was followed by an ill- 

 conditioned Scot of genius, Tobias 

 Smollett, a sardonic and angry 

 painter of sordid and violent life, 

 the creator of some immortal types, 

 as of the English sailor, in ttoderick 

 Random, Peregrine Pickle, and 

 Humphrey Clinker. The tendency 

 of the novel in Smollett's hands 

 to revert to picaresque story was 

 checked by Laurence Sterne, whose 

 self-conscious sentiment and whim- 

 sical humour, which owed much to 

 Rabelais, Montaigne, Cervantes, 

 Burton, and Swift, found expres- 

 sion in The Life and Opinions 

 of Tristram Shandy, Gent., and 

 the Sentimental Journey, a tour 

 through France and Italy, tales 

 which, following no plan, vindicated 

 the right of the novel to take what 

 form it please, so it mirror the idio- 

 syncrasies of character and feeling. 

 Among the followers of these great 

 painters of manners is Frances Bur- 

 ney, with Evelina, Cecilia, and 

 Camilla, while Johnson's Rasselas 

 is but an expanded epilogue of the 

 type of Addison's Vision of Mirza. 

 Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wake- 

 field, with its fanciful, humorous, 

 pathetic picture of life seen through 

 the idealising atmosphere of remin- 

 iscence, had an influence on Goethe 

 and Continental writers hardly in- 

 ferior to that of Richardson. In 

 Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto 

 the first wave of the Gothic revival 

 reached the novel. 



The novel was only one channel 

 of prose literature in the century. 

 If the didactic spirit invaded and 

 chilled poetry, the regard for form, 

 for correctness, elegance and dig- 

 nity of composition, gave artistic 

 interest to work of kinds which a 

 later age has too scrupulously di- 

 vorced from literature. John Locke, 

 Essay concerning Human Under- 

 standing, was a diffuse and cum- 

 brous writer; but there are few 

 finer practitioners in the prose of 

 Dryden and Addison than George 

 Berkeley, Three Dialogues, Alci- 

 phron, and David Hume, Essays. 

 Johnson, poet, lexicographer, es- 

 sayist, and critic, sacrificed the 



lightness of Addisonian style for 

 more force and dignity, not un- 

 touched with pomposity, qualities 

 not more evident in his own work 

 than in the record of his conversa- 

 tion preserved in James Boswell's 

 immortal Life. 



English prose acquires grace and 

 charm in the work ot Oliver Gold- 

 smith, whose Citizen of the World, 

 Vicar of Wakefield, and comedies 

 have an unfading freshness. 

 Edward Gibbon made the same 

 dignified prose the purple vest- 

 ment of his not more learned than 

 splendidly ordered Decline and Fall 

 of the Roman Empire. Edmund 

 Burke, the most diffuse and 

 gorgeous of English orators, com- 

 bined with eloquence a unique in- 

 tellectual and imaginative insight 

 into the principles of politics, 

 the mainsprings of man's social 

 nature. 



A didactic purpose, a regard for 

 " correctness " within a narrow but 

 widening pattern of diction and 

 verse, are the accepted principles 

 of English poetry to the time of 

 Blake and Wordsworth, and even 

 later. The beginning? of a change 

 showed themselves first rather in 

 an enlarged choice of subjects 

 Nature, the Middle Ages, Liberty, 

 and the Natural as opposed to 

 Civilized Man, and in some experi- 

 ments in earlier verse forms, than 

 in any radical change of spirit and 

 style. 



Augustan Conventions 



James Thomson's blank-verse 

 Seasons ; John Dyer's octosylla- 

 bic Granger Hill; the essays in 

 Spenserians, as Thomson's Castle 

 of Indolence ; Thomas Gray's pen- 

 sive Ode on a Distant Prospect of 

 Eton College, or Elegy in a Country 

 Churchyard ; and the equally pen- 

 sive, less finished and sustained, 

 but more spontaneous and sensitive 

 odes of William Collins : the minor 

 poetry of the Wartons, Thomas and 

 Joseph, and of Mark Akenside ; 

 the poems, more Pope-like in form, 

 of Dr. Johnson, as The Vanity of 

 Human Wishes; Oliver Gold- 

 smith's The Deserted Village, and 

 George Crabbe's The Village, all 

 show in different ways the change 

 that is being effected, but are still 

 quite Augustan in their conven- 

 tional " poetic diction," their 

 studied " correctness " in spirit 

 and form ; and so, despite their ro- 

 mantic themes, are Gray's more 

 ambitious odes. The Progress of 

 Poesy and The Bard. 



But the new spirit was to find its 

 proper style, to substitute for a 

 poetic heightening of eloquence a 

 style whose ideal is the free and 

 natural outpouring of the heart. 

 The frost is loosening in the poetic 

 prose of Macpherson's Ossian, and 



